There came a point during the May 21 hearings of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations where you imagined that Franz Kafka was seated at the back of the ornate committee room furiously taking notes. For here was a mother lode of material for his next work on the labyrinthine ways of human nature.

Ostensibly, that Tuesday assembly was to be a confrontation between the lawmakers and Tim Cook, CEO of Apple Inc., one of the biggest tax-avoiders on Earth. That’s not a rumoured allegation, but the upshot of meticulous detective work by Senate staff. The subcommittee issued a report stating that the artful dodgers of Cupertino, Calif. had withheld from the U.S. Treasury at least $74 billion in tax revenue through Apple’s Irish shell companies alone.

That sum is a portion of an estimated $600 billion-plus in U.S. corporate taxes owing but sheltered from the Treasury. The total of withheld taxes would wipe out more than half of America’s record deficit. Which would clip the wings of fiscal hawks on Capitol Hill who use the deficit to justify an austerity chic that is a drag on economic recovery.

On May 20, Carl Levin, the senator from economically devastated Michigan and chair of the committee, had said: “Apple sought the Holy Grail of tax avoidance. It has created offshore entities holding tens of billions of dollars while claiming to be tax resident nowhere.”

Yet the following day, Cook, warned by nearly every commentator in the land he was to suffer a verbal thrashing, was instead told by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) how much she admired Apple as one of the world’s most innovative firms.

Levin weighed in with lavish praise for the iPad. Sen. John McCain wanted to know, “Why the hell do I have to keep updating my apps on my iPhone all the time and why don’t you fix that?”

A Tuesday hearing on legal but dubious corporate behaviour had become an Apple love-in and product review session.

The previous day, Ireland’s deputy prime minister actually claimed that Eire had absolutely no role as an enabler in the tax-avoidance schemes of Apple and its corporate peers, which were drawn to Ireland precisely because of its deep-discount corporate tax rate. (It is 12.5 per cent, lowest in the industrialized world, compared with America’s 35 per cent.)

The issue originated “with other jurisdictions,” he said, without identifying any. What could they be? The City of Limerick, perhaps, or maybe Atlantis?

Cook on May 21 also resorted to finger-pointing, placing the blame for depleted federal and state treasuries on a “tax code that has not kept up with the digital age.” If only America didn’t have an extortionate corporate tax rate compared with other countries, Apple would be pleased to “repatriate” its profits to the U.S.

The working class has seen its share of federal revenues, in the form of payroll taxes, soar to 40 per cent from a post-war 9.7 per cent, while Corporate America’s share has plummeted from 32.1 per cent in 1952 to 8.9 per cent today.

There was no pushback as Tim Cook checked off Apple’s virtuous attributes to the senators. Cook said Apple is “proud to be an American company” (that offshores most of its assembly work to alleged sweatshops in the Pacific Rim), and that Apple doesn’t “depend on tax gimmicks.” (What are the Irish shell companies, then, a make-work project for Ireland’s registrar of corporate ghosts?) And that Apple “serves humanity’s highest values,” Cook said. Fair enough. Apple has finally begun scrutinizing its Taiwanese supplier Foxconn, whose most over-stressed employees were resorting to suicide.

It’s not like Apple avoids paying its fair share of taxes in order to adequately compensate Apple Store employees, who came close to forming a union until Apple this year belatedly raised their $12-an-hour pay by 20 per cent. Nor does Apple need the money for R&D, having decided to “dividend” to shareholders some $100 billion from its dust-gathering cash hoard, even as it surrenders its innovation lead to Google Inc. and others.

The quiescent senators absorbed Cook’s lecture in respectful silence. So this, Kafka might have concluded, is what a field of spent volcanoes looks like.

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